Purebred vs. Mixed Breed – What Kind of Dog Should You Buy?

Purebred vs. mixed breed

What kind of dog should you buy? There are pluses and minuses for each.

With a purebred dog you can look at the dog’s ancestry. You can see if its parents or grandparents have had health problems. You can see how long its ancestors have lived.

On the other hand, purebred dogs have many times been subject to inbreeding. This leads to health problems.

Mixed breeds have generally not been inbred like purebred dogs. So they are not subject to the same health problems.

But you don’t know what you are getting in a mixed breed. You don’t even know what it will look like as an adult.

I own a mixed breed dog. Romeo is closing in on 10 years old and still looks like a puppy. He is extremely healthy. He is the most affectionate dog we have ever owned. So I am a big advocate of mixed breed dogs.

You can’t always go by the breed of dog in making your selection. Each dog is different within each breed.

Any dog must have good training. I don’t care how smart your dog is. It will be a poorly behaved dog if it doesn’t get proper training.

I read an excellent article in DogStarDaily.com. It is entitled, “Mixed Breed or Pure Breed?” It discusses the topic of purebred vs. mixed breed dogs.

Here is a quote from the article:

Breed recommendations often lead unsuspecting owners to believe that once they have selected the right breed, there is nothing more to do. Thinking they have the best possible breed, many owners suffer the misconception that training is unnecessary and so don’t bother. This, of course, is when things start to go downhill.

Even more disturbing, when certain breeds are recommended, other breeds are automatically being advised against. “Experts” often suggest that certain breeds are too big, too small, too active, too lethargic, too fast, too slow, too smart, or too dumb, and therefore too difficult to train. Well, we know that regardless of helpful “advice,” people are probably going to pick the breed they wanted in the first place. But now they may feel disinclined to train the puppy, feeling that the process is going to be difficult and time consuming. Furthermore, owners may rationalize their negligence by citing any one of the pack of convenient excuses listed above.

Some people like to rank order breeds in terms of supposed relative intelligence, citing Border Collies and Golden Retrievers as being smart and Bassett Hounds, Coonhounds, Irish Wolfhounds and Afghan Hounds as being not so smart. Certainly, analyzing differential responses to cognitive tests and puzzles is interesting, but generalizing about breed intelligence can have sad repercussions. For example, a Border Collie owner didn’t bother training their puppy because they thought it was so smart that training was unnecessary. And an Afghan Hound owner didn’t bother training their puppy because they thought it lacked smarts and that training would be impossible.